Free at last

Self-addressed and stamped on December 2, 2007.

Had you all wondering again, didn’t I? Well, dear readers, my latest howling descent into babbling insanity shall not keep me from writing for over five years like the last time it happened. I’m not going anywhere… except out of this prison cell!

Last Monday, after I pulled myself together and stopped scribbling nonsense in my “web grog,” I set about devising a plan to escape from the tiny prison cell in which I was being held. My first attempts were less than successful. Trying to stuff myself into the one electrical outlet in my cell, and then simply flow to freedom along the copper wires, proved to be impossible. Attempting to squeeze myself through the same cracks from which the thousands of tiny gnomes emerged also proved to be (mostly) impossible—I was able to get about 30% of my girth through the 3" hole before I became jammed up pretty good; I was subsequently discovered by the guardsquirrels and beaten senseless for my escape attempt. My third attempt consisted entirely of staring at the ceiling and mumbling to myself, “I’m escaping! I’m escaping! Woo-hoo-hey! I’m escaaaaaping!” It was, I must admit, an abject failure.

My fourth attempt was on Tuesday. I hid inside my mattress and, when the laundry people arrived to take my dirty linens and jam them up their nose, I shouted at them, “Hey! I’m a mattress! And I need to be washed! Won’t you take me to the laundry room and wash me? And then bring me outside to dry?” Suffice it to say, they failed to heed my instructions, and instead called the guardsquirrels again, who extricated me from the mattress and again flagellated me with a beanpole.

Again I attempted escape on Wednesday, twice—no, three times, if I recall infectly. My first Wednesday attempt was a direct and daring attempt to disguise myself as one of the guards: I murdered one of the guardsquirrels and skinned him alive (not in that order), then wrapped his furry gray skin about my torso and sauntered out of the prison cell. Nose held high, I got about three steps outside the cell when the other guardsquirrel noticed I was about nine times as tall as I ought to have been if I were really a security rodent. He and the asylum’s flock of pincer monkeys set upon me with fists and truncheons (and pincers), and soon I was back in the cell, weeping like a little girl still in her pigtails who just had them cut off in a rice picker accident.

(Oh, right. Two more attempts on Wednesday, both failures: One involving a pair of underwear, and the other a pair of socks. There’s really nothing more to say about those two…)

On Thursday, I hitched a ride in a dirigible that landed in my prison cell overnight, and quickly made my way out of the cell and off the prison grounds. Unfortunately, about six miles from the prison and 30,000 feet in the air, the pilot decided he didn’t like the Å in my name, so he kicked me out of his dirigible! I fell 30,005 feet in a straight line but somehow landed right back in my tiny little gorilla-infested cell. I despaired and lamented that only Alyssa Milano’s painstakingly pedicured feet would save me…

I spent most of Friday snarfing down bowl after bowl of golden cornpone stew. I had no idea that the asylum had a drive-thru Pam & Meg’s on the first floor, but apparently they do. I decided further escape attempts could be postponed until I filled up on liquefied cornpones.

Suddenly, an idea struck—the most ingenious idea I’d ever had this side of an em dash. It wasn’t just ingenious, it was something an autistic savant would come up with right before he descended into another round of eager shrieking and babbling. I quickly set about ciphering out the figures on the back of the very napkin I had just used to mop up the cornpones strewn about my cafeteria table. Two hours and several stacks of napkins full of calculations later, I confirmed that not only would it work—it had a 108% probability of success—but that the mind-boggle ratio came out to over nineteen times pi: More than enough to literally blow the minds of each guardsquirrel from here to Kingdom Kong.

I looked around. Two guardsquirrels stood by the exit, calmly burying their nuts under the earthen floor. No other prisoners were in the cafeteria, except 47 of them. I took a deep breath and steeled myself for the inevitable failure that was about to follow. Suddenly and without warning—a poorer writer than I might say, “all of a sudden”—I leapt from my chair, overturned the table, and began swinging the chair over my head, all the while shrieking and babbling eagerly. The two guardsquirrels looked up from their nuttery and started chittering in alarm, but they dared not move—the mind-boggle quotient had already reached pi2 and frozen them in place on each side of the door.

I kicked at the table like a sharpened bull in China, overturning it further and splattering waterlogged golden cornpones everywhere. Remembering an old hunter’s trick I learned from my gorillas, I began running in circles and beating other prisoners out of my path with the chair. The mind-boggle quotient nearing 10·e1−5+å, the two hapless guardsquirrels simultaneously fell to the floor and began fizzing at the mouth. Grinning triumphantly, I dropped the chair, sauntered over to them, and began the chant that would push the mind-boggle factor over 59.5, thus sealing their fate. I began:

With a loud poof, a sudden whirring noise like the sound of an oil-soaked gull crashing to the Earth alongside stony Baffin Bay, followed by a kerplunk! that sounded lifted from an old silent movie, both guardsquirrels exploded, head-first, spraying a fine mist of squirrel brains in every direction. I started howling, “Corn! Gone! Wrong!! Corn! Gone! Wrong!! A-ha-ha-haah, you stinkers, you polymorphically inverse tinkers, you pinker dinkers! It’s corn gone wrong!!!!” With that, I leapt through the doorway, ran up the stairs, ran down a hallway, through another doorway, booted two more guardsquirrels in the face, ran down another hallway, up more stairs, through fourteen more doorways, and finally out another doorway that was more like a gateway. Reaching the surface, I hopped in the Jennifer Love’s Ankles which the guardsquirrels had left unmolested right where I had parked it.

Early this morning I arrived back in orbit of the moon Loquisha. Cackling madly to myself, I began composing the very journal entry you now hold in your bony little fingers.